Mechanical Engineering

TESA Toolbox

ThermoElastic and Seismic Analysis (TESA) Toolbox

The TESA Toolbox is a standalone GUI program for the calculation of bulk thermoelastic and seismic properties of heterogeneous and polycrystalline materials using EBSD data. The toolbox includes a number of different homogenization techniques, including Voigt, Reuss, Hill, geometric mean, self-consistent and Asymptotic Expansion Homogenization (AEH) methods. The user need only specify the microstructure and material properties of the individual minerals or phases. The AEH method, which uses a finite element mesh, is more accurate than the other methods since it explicitly accounts for grain-scale elastic interactions. The microscale stresses and strains can be plotted for prescribed macroscale stresess, strains and temperature changes. The seismic wave speeds and anisotropies are calculated from the bulk elastic stiffnesses and average density. A post-processing interface allows the user to visualize seismic results as equal-area projections or contoured spheres. Results can be exported with publication quality in a number of different formats.

The TESA toolbox is the result of a joint effort between the Mechanical Engineering Department (Alden Cook, Senthil Vel) and the School of Earth and Climate Sciences (Scott Johnson, Chris Gerbi and Won Joon Song) at the University of Maine. The coding was done in Matlab by Alden Cook.